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By selecting metal in the display drop down you should be using full metal which is already hardware accelerated. I believe the greyed out option was an erroneous way of activating metal that was left in by mistake but i shall check on this

As soon as AP has been started on system 2, the system switches to the AMD GPU. Test with the lightning filter showed a filter representation smoothly in real time without artifacts (like with AP on the latest iPad Pro). The CPU load was about 20% while the filter moved wildly.

On system 1, the same filter showed artifacts and jerked noticeably. The CPU load temporarily reached 100% while the filter was moved.

I deactivated the hardware acceleration in System 2 in the settings and promptly showed the same behavior as in System 1 (high CPU load and artifacts while the filter is moved).

If it can be deduced from the tests, AP does not use any metal hardware acceleration in System 1, although the hardware allows this. I guess this is a clear bug in AP

Kind regards,

Gerald

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I can reproduce this on an "iMac (Retina 5K, 27'', ultimo 2014)" with the 4 GB Radeon R9 M295X. Metal can be selected from the popup menu, but the filters don't seem to work any faster. The bottom area for Metal is greyed out as well.

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It seems that most of you missed my previous post above so I shall reiterate

This feature is only enabled for Intel HD and Intel Iris integrated GPUs found in the more recent Macs. Looking at the specs most of you have posted you do not have these (other than your system 2 gkoeder)

So regardless of what graphics card you have if you don't have one of those it will remain greyed out

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The problem is not only related to the grayed-out option, but also to the fact that the performance with metal is equal or even worse than with the other available options. At first glance, it seems as if Metal doesn't use any hardware acceleration in Affinity Photo with the specified graphics cards, although the graphics cards could.
In other words, the announced metal-supported performance of Affinity Photo on a MacBook Pro is quite impressive, while on the iMac it's simply bad although the graphics cards are with macOS native metal-supported.

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on Serifs website Mac Optimisation with Metal 2 support is claimed. I couldn't find a hint to the fact, that this is only true for very few Mac models. I'd really have liked to know this before my purchase. It wasn't a bad one, though. It's just ironic, that all the big iMacs or even two year old models don't support Metal acceleration for AP, but even the cheapest 13" MacBook Pro 2017 does, and with it outperforms the most expensive MacBook Pro 15" from 2014. The issue must be resolvable by Serif, as Apple states full Metal support under system report. I am working with the latest MacBook Air, so I am quite underwhelmed by the performance.

Please add software support for Metal graphics acceleration. Or tell me that it is Apples fault, which I would need good evidence to believe.

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For some reason, that seams to be the case. Although not from Apples side. It's been quite hard to get information about the reason for this from Affinity. The only thing we know is that only the 2016 and older MacBooks are supported for Hardware Acceleration. The interesting thing is that, as I got it, this is only true for the Intel iGPUs. So if you have a MacBook Pro 15" 2016 or later, you'd have to deactivate the AMD GPU, which by Apple fully supports Metal and is far more powerful (and mostly what you paid for in the larger model) than the iGPU. This is also true for the large iMacs. Affinity doesn't offer Hardware Acceleration support for them, as can be seen in gkoeders post above.

I hope I could help you, but all we know that Affinity doesn't offer support for your or my model, although it seems to be possible without problem.

That's why I hope to make this a more popular issue in the forums, so something happens.

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The decision seems strange though. Metal 2 should work on this iGPU, so I don't really see a hardware related reason for this other than Affinity might simply not (yet) include support for all Metal 2 capable devices. Would be great to know if this is the case and if one can hope for more supported (i)GPUs in future updates.

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I hope support will be added in the near future, but Affinity seams to be focusing on iPad versions of their Apps and Publisher right now.

I agree with you on the strangeness of the decision. I own a MacBook Air with a 2015 CPU, so Photo doesn't run as fast as it could, which annoys me, as it basically renders the software unusable. I fell for the marketing promise full Metal support, but even after knowing the problem I found no page to look for the supported models in advance.

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No, Metal is a graphics API from Apple, which is fully supported with all GPU‘s which Apple builds into its Systems. But Photo only makes use of it, when there is ONLY an intel iGPU from 2016 or later in your system. So Photo, as absurd as this sounds, runs way faster on a 13“ MBP than on a 15“ MBP, because it has a dedicated GPU. Especially the iPad Version is extremely fast, because Metal is the only option on iOS.

This is 100% a problem that Serif could fix, but didn‘t for a long time.

Sadly no fix in sight, as there were no Updates to the Mac Version of Photo for several months. I think Serif is focusing on Piblisher right now, maybe when that is released, resources will be re-allocated for the work on Photo.

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Expensive and powerful eGPU, but no help for Affinity Photo. Sadly, it seems like nothing is happening.

Something is happening

1.6's Metal compute support is only for a limited set of integrated GPUs typically found on the MacBook range (2016 and newer). There is currently no support for eGPUs. There is no need to disable the discrete GPU—Photo can still use this for presentation to screen whilst using the integrated GPU for compute.

1.7, however, which is currently in beta, does have extensive GPU compute support and is certainly at the point where you would see improvements in several areas. You're welcome to try the public beta here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/19-photo-beta-on-mac/ (download link is in the latest stickied thread). It will make good use of multiple GPUs in many cases and will scale to however many devices are available to the system.